The complaint said the company had a “boiler-room style sales culture” in which recruiters were instructed to use high-pressure sales techniques and inflated claims about career placement to increase student enrollment, regardless of applicants’ qualifications. Recruiters were encouraged to enroll even applicants who were unable to write coherently, who appeared to be under the influence of drugs or who sought to enroll in an online program but had no computer.

Facebook and ComScore have teamed up for a new service, Social Essentials. It offers unprecedented insights into the influence of brands on social media, complete with detailed credit card behavior, and findings suggest it’s not really your brand’s fans you need to worry about–it’s their friends.

The company started work on a powerful personalization algorithm four years ago. Now it’s paying dividends. The system generates 45,000 totally unique versions of the Today module every five minutes. (All five screenshots in this post were taken within minutes of each other, using different Yahoo accounts.)

The retail point of sale is fundamentally changing. It is moving from traditional checkout lines to wherever the customer may be: shopping on the Internet, walking a store’s aisles, traveling or lounging on the beach. Are you prepared for what this means to capturing and retaining customers?

Apparently the police in Long Beach, California, have a policy that says if a police officer determines that a photographer is taking photos of something with “no apparent esthetic value,” they can detain them.

“It’s direct intimidation in the sense of letters, emails, occasional phone calls and threats,” says Professor Simon Wessely, of King’s College London, who has received a series of death threats and threatening phone calls, and now has his mail routinely scanned for suspect devices.